Looking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan at the front of Sak’s, the famous art deco department store. On Google StreetView the stripes of the flags are bright and crisp, the decorative ironwork above the windows is sharply visible and when I pan across the road to Cole Haan the gold figures on the doors shine brightly in the sunlight. On StreetSide the colours are muddy and dull, the faces haven’t been blurred out but the image is of such poor quality they don’t need to be and Cole Haan’s statues are yellowish smudges.

Across the continent in Los Angeles, Microsoft themselves have used the corner of Rodeo Drive and Dayton Way as an example. Here the Microsoft image is better than in New York (perhaps LA’s brighter light is more suited to the Navteq camera equipment they’re using), but Streetview again outperforms. There’s an unfortunate line where two images meet in the middle of the Gianfranco Ferre shop, but the cobbles in the pavement are easier to make out, the text on the advert carousel is legible and I had to go to Google to find out what the crossing street was called, as it’s unlabelled in StreetSide. You have to go back to map view to find out where you are.

Rodeo Drive on Bing

Rodeo Drive on Google Streetview

To use StreetSide you must have Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in installed, while Google Maps works with Javascript, which is pre-installed in almost every browser. Microsoft have been very keen to talk about the panning effect in StreetSide that should make the transition between images better than Streetview’s, but on my Mac I got a strange diagonal smearing of the image followed by a long period of a blocky image becoming slightly less blocky as it downloads. This could be a problem with Mac Silverlight, but it was just as pronounced on the Windows Vista I tested it on.

The lines that are laid over the photographs to indicate street direction are not well aligned with the terrain, the images above street level – a little blurry in Streetview – seem to have been compressed to the point where the colours appear in crude blocks, and zooming in makes the imperfections look even worse. It does have one clear advantage over Streetview: the mosaic effect in Google's maps that often makes the edges of objects appear not to meet up, or half a car appear to collide with half a pedestrian, seems to have been well dealt with, but it's a fairly small point.

Competition is good, even in free products. It’s great that Microsoft are taking their own set of photographs, but I can’t see the point of sending those cars out on such a mammoth project without setting the quality dials as high as possible. I'm waiting to talk to someone from Microsoft at the moment, I'll update later with their response.

Update: Microsoft have been in touch to say that the US pictures are up to two years old and tehcnology has moved on since then, so the Navteq cars that will be taking the European images are better equipped. They also have Lidar to make a 3D map of their surroundings, to be used in overlaying the photographs onto models of the buildings. They haven't yet been able to say how much better the image quality will be.